Altona 7 November 2020,
Hi Marlis,
First of all, a very, very, very belated happy
birthday! I know it was a while ago and I sort of completely forgot to send you
a card…but I am just terrible at those things, so I hope the previous letter
might count as a ‘card’ too! 😊
Quickly moving on from that embarrassment, I hope
you’ve been doing well and managed to get out a bit more now the weather is
improving. It was so nice to hear from you in September on the phone, always a
nice surprise. Well, it has been another eventful 2 months here in Victoria, so
let’s dive straight into it.
My new job at Bombora furniture
5 weeks ago, when cabinet making school started again,
I ended up talking to one of the teachers and he mentioned he might have a job
opportunity. Having heard that many times before and not exactly having a good
time applying to jobs and hearing back, I wasn’t that optimistic. But hey, you
have to be in it to win it, so I sent in my letter and resume on Tuesday, had a
phone conversation on Wednesday , interviewed on Friday, got the very welcome
“you’re hired” call the same afternoon (best birthday gift ever!) and started
on Monday the 12th.
It’s in Torquay (Tor-key), which is about 90km away
from home to the West, but only takes about an hour to get to. The drive up to
Geelong and beyond is just the best. I used to love it when I still worked
at/for Deakin University and this is just 25km further and twice as nice as
scenery goes. The team is made up of nice and extremely competent people and
it’s such a change from my previous apprentice spot. No one is angry, no things
get thrown, no sulking, no chaos, just calm and friendly people making very
cool things! Also, there’s another 100% Dutch lady and two others who are 50%
Dutch and their mom is from Rotterdam too, so they are definitely good
people, ha-ha.
Did I mention they also have a kelpie dog? He’s just
the best bundle of energy and always makes me laugh, running around and getting
into trouble, chewing on pieces of timber and barking at birds. He’s everyone’s
friend and probably thinks he’s quite the tradie himself too 😊
We (not me, really) make lots of bathroom vanities,
tables, tv cabinets, beds, benches, shaving cabinets and some other small
items. It’s all timber and mostly hardwood which is a lot more technical and
rewarding to work with. I clean, sort, organise, oil and polish, lift stuff,
sand stuff, go on delivery and pick up runs and generally try to be helpful
where I can. They are very serious about safety and teaching me the right way
of doing things and I could just not be luckier and happier to have landed
here. We get paid 5 days a week, but if the work is done on Thursday (almost
always) we just get the day off and still get paid, that’s pretty good however
you look at it, right?!
If we’re both still happy to be working together after
Summer next year, Yumi and I might just decide to move up that way, because
it’s just gorgeous out there. For now, I am happy to commute and see where
things go.
Yumi’s work and studies
Yumi is as busy as ever and has been working with 3-4
different clients as usual. The two major ones couldn’t love her work more and
she’s still such a happy worker bee that I wish she’d started her own business
much sooner. She’s also started a new business training course. I won’t bore
you with too many details, but it’s very much aligned with her way of working
and thinking, based on an idea from a man called Ricardo Semler and he was a
bit of a sensation in the late 90’s and early 2000’s when big corporations were
looking for new and better ways to run their businesses (and make even more
money). His South American business, Semco, was run completely democratic, with
staff making most of the decisions and taking responsibility for all key
processes. It took about 20 years to be turned into a management theory/model
that can be transferred to other businesses and now it has found its way to
Australia. Yumi will be part of the very first cohort getting trained and I
predict that this will end up being the way she goes when both her business
partners retire. She’ll learn very little from the course itself, but she will
make lots of new work friends and get a good sense of how far ahead she is in
her field of expertise. 2021 is looking to be a very goodyear for her once
more!
Going back to school
I was very stoked to finally start school for real. It
was just four half-ish days from 5 to 8 October and I would have loved to have
done more, but my first project (Garden bench) is taking shape and I am already
well ahead of everyone else. Not that it’s a competition, we’re all there for
our own reasons, but this means I don’t have to wait on anyone else when using
the big machines, which is awesome.
We’re a group of 16 students, I am the oldest and
there’s 2 more older students, the rest could be my kids, haha. The teachers
are nice to chat to and happy for me to just do my own thing, which I really
like and appreciate.
Now that I am working again, it also means I can take
my project with me at the end of the week and work on it during my lunch breaks
and out of hours. The sooner I get it done, the better! The coming week I’ll be
going to work in the morning, work from 7 to 11.15 and then drive to school for
a 12.30 to 4.30 half day for four days in a row. I hope to have my bench done
by Thursday afternoon, but we’ll see how it goes, I am not in THAT much of a
rush!
SES volunteering
It’s been quiet with jobs to go out on, but quite busy
with training. I am so very much over the online meetings we’ve been having
instead of training that I now only log on every other week. There’s just not
that much happening on those calls and I prefer to just read the email update
instead. Save me 90 minutes of sitting and listening while I could be doing
other, more fun, things. We did have some trees fall over, roofs leaking and
even some people getting stuck in the mud out on the bay which required quite
the rescue effort, but all in all, it’s been calm and uneventful. We had a good
job on Tuesday night when a tree dropped a sizeable branch on a car and I got
to play with the chainsaws for 20 minutes or so. The car wasn’t a complete
write-off and we worked well as a team (as always) so everyone was happy in the
end and we were out and back home in 75 minutes 😊.
We’re training up a group of newer recruits to
complete their basic training so they can progress to…even more training! Today
is the exam for 8 of them and it looks like they will all pass. They’ve put in
the time and lots of effort and I think they are ready to move on to the next
level. Once this is behind them, they can go on to train for roofs, chainsaw,
boats and incident management, so I hope they all do well and become available
to go out on jobs more often to do different things. It’ll be strange to have
options, because at the moment it’s nearly always me and maybe 5-6 others
responding to most call outs. Time to let others have a go!
Victorian lockdown
From this Monday, we’ll be officially out of lockdown
and the ‘ring of steel’ around Melbourne will be taken down. It’s been such a
strange time, but overall, it wasn’t too bad for Yumi or myself. We could still
do most things we wanted to do, just closer to home and for shorter periods of
time. Yumi’s work happens mostly online and my work is in regional Victoria
where there’s almost no noticeable impact any way. It’ll take some time for
things to feel like ‘normal’ again. Last Tuesday was really warm here and the
beach was just packed. Not much social distancing going on and only half the
visitors were wearing facemasks. Ah well, what can you do. And in two weeks’
time everyone is outraged because we’re in a third wave. Stupid is as stupid does,
I guess. We turned around halfway to the beach and decided that further away
from the crowds was just as much fun as anything else 😊.
Doggo!!
These are some pictures of Early, the foster greyhound
who will be staying with us for the next three weeks. He’s 5 years old and ran
134 races in his career. Now he’s retired and needs to be trained to be around
humans and different situations after living at the tracks for 5 years. It’s
Yumi’s volunteer project that she signed up for 7 months ago and due to COVID-19
it took until today for him to come and stay with us. He’s still very skittish
and needs to process a lot of new experiences, so we’re leaving him alone in
the back yard, which seems to work for him too.
Yumi will go on walks, teach him to walk up and down
stairs, interact with other dogs, get used to riding in the car, hearing trains
and cars and how to be around humans. It’s all very exciting and very cool to
have an animal in the house again (not counting myself) after 3 or so years
going without. Once the three weeks are up, he’ll get his report card according
to Yumi’s very impressive training plan and then he’ll go to his new family.
We’re happy to be his first real human home. It’s calm and quiet most days and
just like us, he’s not crazy about kids and small dogs. We’ll get along really well,
I think!
Cert-4 Training course
I am still diligently powering on with my “Training
and Assessment” course, but it’s just so much paperwork! I’ve passed all the
theory, passed 6 assignments and only have to do the last 3 of 9 assignments
with 3 months to go still. I’ve done a few presentations and online training
deliveries, filled in about 150 pages of forms (not even kidding) and now I
just want to be done with it. This is one of those things that was never going
to be a lot of fun, I knew that. Somehow, I think that if we’d done it in a
classroom setting face-to-face, we’d have had a better experience. Some things
are just a lot harder and the requirements so oddly specific and impractical
that I’ll be happy when it’s over and done. I just keep reminding myself that
this is a useful qualification to have and SES pick up the bill so I don’t have
to pay a cent, which is kind of cool 😊.
Donna’s Award
Maybe you remember that around this time last year I
was doing this clean up and organise project with the National Homeless
Collective in Brunswick? The lady who masterminds it all has been recognised as
the Victorian Australian of the Year and I am just so happy for her.
Organisations and people like her work very hard for very little recognition
and I truly hope that this opens even more door, but especially that she gets
more access to the funding that she needs for her many projects. Since my
school and apprenticeships took up most of my days again, I’ve drifted away
from them a bit. I am planning to stop by next Friday to see how they are going
and see if I can help in some way. Their store and central point of activity
has been closed for months and I am sure they didn’t take up all my
recommendations and suggestions, but we’ll see if there’s something I can help
with in their constant quest to end homelessness.
2020 Road trip…cancelled
We were planning to go on a big road trip from
Melbourne to Cairns and other places during the Christmas break, but with this
whole COVID-19 situation it’s probably not going to happen. We might still come
to the ACT and spend a few days, but that’ll be it. Hotels and other places to
stay have pretty much all been booked out until February 2021 and are so much
more expensive than before. I get it, they have to make up for 9 months of lost
income, but the day I pay $250+ for a very mediocre room with no aircon in a backwater
town in Queensland hasn’t quite come around just yet. Ah well, there’s always
next year. I might still be able to convince Yumi to move to WA instead!
I am getting old!
At least it feels like it sometimes. First, I had the
tennis elbow on my right and left arm, then the golf elbow on my other arm.
Then I hurt my back two weeks ago and the skin condition on my face got a lot
worse. It’s all much better now, but it did feel like my body was just slowly
breaking down, ha-ha. I managed to keep working and aside from some Voltaren
(that stuff is magical) and a few visits to the physio, I am good again. The
physio suggested I try ‘dry needling’. That’s sort of like acupuncture but with
less needles or something like that. It was very cool when his colleague pushed
the needles in. They looked huge, but I
didn’t feel a thing. Not sure that it actually helped, but it also didn’t hurt,
so I’ll just add that to the list of things I tried once!
Small stuff
· Family and friends are good. Moving house, having babies,
starting new jobs, new relationships and all that life stuff.
· I am so happy the US elections are over, finally
something else to listen to on the radio again. Going by the coverage you’d
think Australia was electing their own new president, but we have Scotty from
Marketing, our very own Trump already, ha-ha.
· I’ve been vegan for about 2 months now and have to say
it’s not nearly as hard as I thought! I don’t really miss cheese or eggs at all
and have some new yoghurts to munch on. It probably helped that I was a
vegetarian for 15 years already.
Okay, that’s us all caught up and up to date again.
I’ll be in touch if we plan to come to the ACT to see if we can perhaps come
and visit.
Be well and stay safe,
Gilbert
